


The Batman Files: The Hunt for the Wayne Killer

by Nicksname



Series: Earth-Nick [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2020-05-20 13:10:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19377370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nicksname/pseuds/Nicksname
Summary: The history of the Batman through various installments. This story covers the early days of Bruce Wayne's life. Before he was Batman, before he left Gotham, and before he made a promise to wage war on all criminals, Bruce Wayne was out for blood.





	1. Tragedy

The boy who would become Batman was born on February 19th, 1973. 

Born to Dr. Thomas and Martha Wayne, young Bruce was settled into the lap of luxury from an early age. His father’s family had built Gotham City, his home, and his mother’s family had helped pay for it. Theirs was the old blood of Gotham, stretching back for hundreds of years. Set to inherit Wayne Enterprises, his family’s company, Bruce’s life had been planned out for him before he was even conceived. 

Despite the grand legacy that lay before him, Bruce’s parents did their best to humble the boy. He was made to care for his city so that he would look after its legacy when his parents were gone. 

Bruce was a social lad and was quick to make friends with other children in his parents’ social circles. Though he had many playmates as a child, he was never as close to the other children as he was with Thomas Elliot and Julie Madison. But the friend Bruce desired most in his earliest years was a brother, and his parents were happy to give him one. Tragedy struck the Wayne family for the first time, however, when just weeks before Thomas Jr. was due, Martha was involved in a horrific car accident. Though Bruce’s mother survived, his younger brother did not.

Since he could turn on the television, Bruce Wayne had been obsessed with masked crusaders like Zorro and the Gray Ghost. With the loss of his younger brother, his parents decided to spend more time with their son. To cater more to his interests, they began making weekly trips to the local Monarch Theater.

It was on the hot summer night of June 26th, 1981 that tragedy would strike the Waynes once more. While exiting the theater after a showing of _The Mask of Zorro_ , the Wayne family took a shortcut down Park Row, infamously known to the citizens of Gotham City as ‘Crime Alley’. A once great neighborhood gone very, very bad, the Waynes had made a grave error going down such a dangerous path so late at night.

Halfway down the alley, a man with a gun appeared from the shadows. The man demanded their money and jewelry. Thomas surrendered his wallet and watch, but when the man moved to snatch Martha’s pearl necklace, Thomas moved to help his wife.  **Bang**. Startled, the man shot Thomas dead. Martha screamed. **Bang**. Her pearl necklace went everywhere, broken from the impact of the man’s movement to silence her screams. The man took one look at young Bruce. Through his tears, Bruce saw an expression that would stick with him for the rest of his life. Was it consideration he saw? Fear? It vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and the man disappeared into the night, leaving the last Wayne in a puddle of his parents’ blood.


	2. Alone

James Worthington Gordon was the son of a lawyer. Perhaps he became a cop to spite his old man, who he had never gotten along with, or maybe he just felt a calling. Nevertheless, no one could explain why Gordon would transfer from his home of Chicago to the cold and dreary Gotham City. 

On his first night as an officer of the GCPD, Gordon was one of the first responders to sounds of gunfire in Crime Alley. He was also the one who slipped Dr. Thomas Wayne’s coat around the shoulders of the young Wayne boy and told him everything was going to be alright. 

Gordon tried to track down the killer, but only managed to find Thomas Wayne’s wallet… as well as the gun that had killed the leaders of Gotham’s most beloved family. 

Though there were relatives on Bruce’s mother’s side of the family who would take him in, the relationship between Martha and her siblings had always been strained, and it was Bruce’s parents’ wish that the family butler Alfred Pennyworth become their son’s guardian. It was Alfred who picked Bruce up from the police station that night.

In the years following his parents' deaths, young Bruce would be raised by Alfred. He was assisted only by an old friend of Bruce's father, Dr. Leslie Thompkins. Together they tried to help Bruce through the trauma of the event, but of course, it would never really go away. 

It was on December 7th, 1982 that the next major event in Bruce’s life would occur. He was on the couch, watching reruns of classic episodes from _The Gray Ghost_. In an effort to stop the Mad Bomber from destroying the city, the titular hero offered to put the fate of his home on the line for a simple coin flip. Thinking the hero a fool, the crazed villain accepted the challenge. The Gray Ghost claimed heads for his bet. Three times the coin was flipped, and each time the result was heads. Once he had his victory, the crusader revealed that he had fixed the game with a double-headed coin. Outraged, the Mad Bomber moved to exact his evil scheme, but he was quickly defeated. 

As the episode came to an end, the fire in the room went out. Nine-year-old Bruce Wayne found himself alone in the dark room. Alfred was somewhere on the other side of the house, he knew, but in that room, Bruce felt very alone. He had felt very alone for quite a while, since his parents’ lives had been taken from him. At that moment, Bruce sank to his knees and prayed. He had prayed many times since his parents’ deaths, but on that cold winter night, he prayed one last time. No answer. No one was going to help him. No one was there.

Bruce removed the knife he had taken from his father’s medical supplies a few weeks earlier. It was a sharp blade, and he knew what to do with it. He had been thinking about it, on some level, since the hours he spent in the station, waiting for someone to come get him, his clothes stained with his parents’ blood. 

Bruce Wayne put the cool metal to his wrists, and slit them both.


	3. Purpose

Alfred and Leslie had acted quickly and Bruce’s suicide attempt failed. The camp that Bruce spent the next two months at was to help him work through his trauma, but Bruce had already given into the darkness, and perhaps he would have tried to take his own life again, if not for Harvey Dent.

Bruce met Harvey during the first day at the camp; they were roommates. The facility was meant to be a place for traumatized and troubled boys. On the surface, Harvey fit the camp’s troubled description far more than he did traumatized, but that was not the case at all. 

Harvey had been sent to the camp after severely beating his father with a baseball bat. A deeply disturbed boy, Bruce was warned by other patients to be wary of him. But this dangerous reputation was merely a fabrication, courtesy of Harvey’s father. Christopher Dent had been beating Harvey for years. Upset by his dead-end job, his wife’s success, and his shitty life, Chris decided to take it out on his son. But fair was fair. Every time he did it, he flipped a coin. If the coin landed on heads, Harvey went free. If it landed on tails, Harvey went to bed with bruises. The baseball bat incident was all in self-defense, but Harvey had fled the scene afterward. By the time Officer James Gordon had brought him back home, Christopher Dent had convinced everyone that Harvey was a disturbed boy who had hit his father unprovoked. 

Empathizing with Harvey’s situation, Bruce offered a piece of advice. Remembering the episode of _The Gray_ _Ghost_ he had been watching before he tried to kill himself, Bruce suggested that Harvey employ a trick double-headed coin when his father flipped to decide if he got to go free. Harvey thought this was a wonderful idea and immediately took a liking to Bruce. Determined to pay Bruce back for his gift, Harvey helped keep Bruce’s spirits up while at the camp and even taught him a few self-defense moves. But Harvey’s biggest gift to Bruce came in a piece of advice, not unlike the one Bruce had given him. 

Bruce had been filled with sorrow over his parents’ deaths for almost two years. He wasn’t sure how he could keep on living without his parents to guide him. But why continue to mourn for his parents when he could avenge them?

With renewed purpose, Bruce was able to pass the camp evaluation and go home just in time for his tenth birthday. When Alfred picked him up, Bruce told Alfred that he wanted to learn how to fight. Bruce’s guardian had been an MI6 agent back in the day and had plenty of skills to prove it. Glad to see that Bruce was willing to move forward and put his mind to something else, Alfred accepted the proposal.

Harvey had been right, the best way for Bruce to honor his parents was to find the man from the alley. The police had found the gun, but not the killer. Bruce would find him, and with training, he’d be ready to face him.

When Bruce found his parents’ murderer, he was going to kill him.


	4. Justice

It had been over four years since Bruce had set out on his quest to find and kill the man who had taken his parents from him. The year was 1987 and Bruce was not alone in this search. A couple of months earlier, James Gordon, the first responder to the scene of the Wayne murders, was promoted to detective. He dug up the unsolved case and began attempting to solve it. 

Bruce had a significant head start on the detective, however. His years of investigation finally led him to a name: Joseph Chilton. 

With Gordon hot on his heels, Bruce began the process of locating Chilton, or “Joe Chill," as he was called by the Gotham underworld. Bruce wasn’t afraid to use his wealth to his advantage and bought information from drug dealers, prostitutes, and even a back-alley doctor. In addition to his training with Alfred, Bruce had also been learning fighting skills under former boxer Ted Grant. Bruce had no qualms about using these to get information out of people when necessary.

In the end, these pursuits led him to the location of Chill’s hideout. Before he could act, Bruce enlisted his old friend Harvey Dent to do him one last favor. Harvey used some of Bruce’s money to pay off one of his father’s old police buddies. As Harvey told Bruce, everyone in the GCPD had a price. The cop stole the gun that had killed the Waynes from the GCPD evidence locker, and Harvey delivered it to Bruce.

Bruce’s double-headed coin trick had worked wonders for Harvey... well, for a few years. But during the summer of ‘86, Harvey’s father had discovered the coin. In a rage, Christopher Dent attacked his son in front of his wife. When she tried to pull him off, he rounded on her. When the police arrived, Laura Dent told the officers that she had shot her husband in self-defense, but in truth, Harvey had been the one to put his father’s own .22 to the back of Christopher Dent’s head.

While Harvey’s true demons hadn’t even begun to manifest, he considered himself free of the monster that had haunted his childhood. Eager for Bruce to get his own vengeance, Harvey loaded the gun for his friend and embraced him. They would not see each other again for eleven years.

Bruce Wayne arrived at Joe Chill’s doorstep on the evening of May 27th, 1987. When the man opened the door, Bruce told him that he wanted information. Chill took one look at Bruce’s expensive clothes and ushered him in, eager to get away from prying ears, and the rich boy’s money into his own pockets. Bruce began by asking for petty info on local gangs and shifted the topic to the murderers of certain upper-class Gothamites. 

Then he asked about the Wayne murders. Chill got quiet and asked him to leave, wary. Bruce pulled out Chill’s own gun, told the man who he was, and that he was going to kill him. 

Recognizing the boy, who had grown much in the past six years, Chill became resigned to his fate. He informed Bruce that he felt it was wrong for him to go unpunished after committing so many sins in his life. The look on young Bruce Wayne’s face after Chill had gunned down his parents had him running scared. It was an expression that had firmly implanted itself in Chill’s brain. Those murders haunted him, and Chill was ready to pay for them. 

He instructed Bruce on how to grip the gun properly and to point it at his chest. But at the last moment, Bruce pulled away. Agitated, Chill told Bruce that he _had_ to kill him. He was a monster. But Bruce realized that Chill was not the monster Harvey had promised. Joseph Chilton was just a man.

Bruce put the gun down on the table, left the apartment, and walked home.

Detective Gordon arrived only hours later, having also solved the murders. By then, Chill’s blood was already cold. He had killed himself with the same gun he’d used in the darkness of Crime Alley six years before.

Bruce had sought justice for his parents for years, but he realized that revenge was not the same thing. What Chill told Bruce had stuck with him. Gotham was hurting, and there was a darkness eating at it. Bruce wanted to fix it, but he didn’t have the skills yet. To fix Gotham, he’d have to be better than people like Chill. He had to be better than the murderers and criminals who would kill another man in cold blood. 

He would not kill.

Bruce believed in a Gotham where no child would ever have to face what he did. A city not run by crime and corruption, but by justice. He would devote himself to this. He wasn’t ready yet, but Bruce knew that if he trained, he could bring the justice that Gotham needed, and honor his parents’ legacy. He made a vow beneath his parents' graves that very night. Bruce Wayne swore by the spirits of his parents that he would avenge their deaths by spending the rest of his life warring on all criminals. 

At age fourteen, Bruce graduated early. After saying one last goodbye to Alfred, Bruce caught the next flight out of Gotham. 

Bruce Wayne disappeared, and he would not be back for over eleven years.


End file.
